How often are you keeping in touch with your leads? Even as a B2B organization, email marketing is an effective and convenient way to stay in touch with your customers. Here are eight top tips for better email marketing.
Tip #1: Tell a Story
A marketing email doesn’t necessarily have to be about hard sales all of the time. Tell a story about how your company helped a specific customer or how your business came to be. People buy from people and storytelling is a powerful way to amp up your business relationships.
Tip #2: Add Value with Every Message
In order to make email marketing successful, you have to find ways to get people to open your messages. One super simple way to do this is to add value to every message. Offer free advice, tips, or guidance. After a few messages, your recipients will start to look forward to seeing your name in the inbox.
Tip #3: Send More Often
Perhaps the most common email marketing mistake companies make is by not sending to their list often enough. The truth is that just once or twice a month or every few weeks isn’t going to cut it. Instead, try to touch base at least twice a week in total. Now, this doesn’t have to always be an email. It can be a phone call and an email one week, and a piece of direct mail and an email the next week. Try to vary it based on your customer list and their needs.
Tip #4: Don’t Make Your Emails Too Long
When telling a story or educating your clients via email, it is important to not get too long with your message. Shorter is usually better and catches the reader’s attention much more effectively. Try to stay under 1,000 words or less. If you have something important that requires more in-depth analysis, consider splitting the text up into a series of messages spread out over a few weeks or linking to a blog post on your homepage.
Tip #5: Don’t Get Too Graphic-Heavy
There’s nothing worse than getting an email in your inbox and having to wait forever for it to load. Plus, not all email programs allow messages with images to go through or they instantly mark them as spam. Thus, make sure you keep the use of graphics in your email messages as minimal as possible, such as a logo and maybe one or two others.
Tip #6: Use Emojis Sparingly
There’s this new trend where companies and major brands are starting to use emojis in their email marketing. While this can be somewhat cutesy and fun, you shouldn’t overdo it. Not only does this make your message seem less professional, but it can also be distracting.
Tip #7: Track Your Results
When engaging in email marketing for your business, it is important to consistently track your results. The reason for this is that you need to be able to see what is working best and then scale up. Most major email service providers (ESPs) have features to allow you to see how many of your messages have a positive open rate, the best time of day to send, and more.
Tip #8: Have a Consistent Schedule
If you’re keeping the above tips in practice, then it is highly probable that your customers are opening your messages on a regular basis. Having a consistent schedule gives them a good idea of when to look out for your email in their inbox.
Email Marketing is Still a Great Way to Contact Leads
While there are marketers out there who insist that email marketing is dead, the truth is that it is still one of the most effective ways to contact leads. The distinction to remember here is that your emails have to be valuable to your customers in order to cut through the clutter of a full inbox.
